The Fugitive

Former Radical Katherine Power's 2 Decades On The Run-from The Fbi And From Her Conscience

September 24, 1993|By Jane Meredith Adams. Special to the Tribune.

So when a charismatic former prison inmate attending Brandeis named Stanley R. Bond talked about robbing banks to help fund the student rebellion, she heeded the call. "She was young, naive, very intelligent and impressionable," her attorneys say now. She was a leader of the Student Strike Force, which organized protests at campuses around the country. He was angry and radical. They teamed up. Some Brandeis students speculated that Power and Bond were lovers.

First, together with Saxe and others, they robbed a National Guard Armory to get weapons. According to news reports at the time, Power became physically ill during the robbery and afterward was relegated to "support activities." Then came the State Street Bank robbery, the death of Schroeder and the beginning of her life on the lam.

She learned to hide. She and Saxe traveled to Philadelphia, then to the South, then to Hartford, Conn., and Lexington, Ky. Power called herself Mary or Mae. She worked in restaurants and stayed in women's communes where the activists vowed to keep them safe. (In 1975-76, one woman spent more than a year in jail in Lexington for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Saxe and Power.)

To the other coast

In 1974, Saxe and Power split up. Saxe headed for Philadelphia, where she was arrested months later and served eight years in jail. Power became more determined than ever to vanish. She obtained the birth certificate of Alice Metzinger, a baby who had died of meningitis within a year of Power's birthday, Jan. 25, 1949. She set out for Oregon, that liberal, rural region about as far from the Boston Police Department as you can get and still find someone willing to debate the merits of anarchy.

Oregon state records reveal she had an Oregon driver's license in 1977. She first lived in Portland, where she met Ron Duncan, a meat cutter and bookkeeper who became her husband last year after a relationship of more than a decade. Power was a single mother at the time, raising her son.

Then she got a job at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, about 40 miles north of Eugene, teaching cooking and from there worked in Eugene at Napoli and helped to start M's, a restaurant in nearby Corvallis. She and her family lived in Lebanon in a modest white house where paint is peeling off the front door and the bottom of the screen door is missing. They were unconventional, according to more strait-laced neighbors.

"They didn't believe in cutting the grass," said Myrtle Laidlaw, a neighbor. "You should have seen it. It really grew up." Neighbors took over the job of mowing the lawn.

"She's never been a person interested in accumulating money," said Celeste Mathews, a friend. When Power sold her share of Napoli restaurant, she tried to figure out a way to give the money to Oxfam, an international relief agency. But according to Scharf, she was unable to sort through some legal issues surrounding the gift and never made it.

A former cooking student of Powers', Dean Carlozzi, remembers her and her husband as "hippies." "He had long hair," Carlozzi said. She wore sweatshirts, Levis and Birkenstocks, he said, except when she cooked. Then it was formal chef's whites, including a hat.

She was a strong presence in the kitchen, he said. "One of the best things Alice is known for is not tolerating a lot of mistakes," he said. "If you made a repeated mistake she'd yell at you, and she had a voice you could hear in the next room with the door closed."

A proper goodbye

One thing she learned as a fugitive was that goodbyes were often quick and mysterious. She didn't want that this time. She put up a notice in the backroom of Napoli inviting friends to a goodbye potluck held the Sunday before she surrendered: "I'm departing soon for a journey to parts unknown," the notice read.

She had been preparing for the journey for more than a year, tying up loose ends. According to Scharf, it was the reason Power sold the business. It was a reason she married her husband and why he legally adopted her son this summer. At some point, she told her husband the truth about her past. He won't say when he learned. She waited until about three weeks ago to tell her son, then waited until he started his first week in high school before she left for Boston. There, after pleading guilty to charges of manslaughter and armed robbery, she is awaiting sentencing Oct. 6 to what her attorneys say will probably be about five years in prison.

About 40 friends came to the goodbye party, including members of her therapy group who had known only that she'd had a past she couldn't discuss with them. Her therapist had used the metaphor of being involved with a member of the Mafia and fleeing for your life to explain Power's emotional state.

She cooked polenta with vegetables, one of her favorite dishes. They passed around a stick of burning sage to cleanse the energy. Then, when everyone was gathered in a circle, Power told them she was going away, that she'd "committed a crime of conscience," and that she needed to make up for it, Mathews said. She told them she wasn't Alice Metzinger at all; she was Katherine Ann Power, once considered "armed and very dangerous" by the FBI. Many were stunned. The group decided it would meet every year on her birthday to remember her.

"When is your birthday?" someone asked, as if to say, "Who are you anyway?" They were used to celebrating Feb. 14, the birthday Alice Metzinger had.